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Comment by ternnoburn | Hacker News Reader

"Other bad things exist" does not mean this thing isn't bad. Or absolutely could be that all these other things are huge energy wasters AND chat gpt is an energy waster.

We have to stop thinking about problems so linearly -- it's not "solve only the worst one first", because we'll forever find reasons to not try and solve that one, and we'll throw up our hands.

Like, we're well aware animal agriculture is a huge environmental impact. But getting everyone to go vegetarian before we start thinking about any other emissions source is a recipe for inaction. We're going to have to make progress, little by little, on all of these things.

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Except that's not the point of this: the point is that humans have absolutely finite time to think about problems, and so the way you distract from a problem is by inventing a new more exciting one.

LLMs are in the news cycle, so sending all the activists after LLMs sure does a good job ensuring they're not going after anything which would be more effective doesn't it? (setting aside my thoughts for the moment of the utility of the 'direct action' type activists who I think have been useless for a good long while now - there could not possibly be more 'awareness' of climate change).

Then again, if you can stall a nascent polluter before it becomes entrenched, maybe that's the right time to intervene. Getting people to not eat meat is hard, we've been eating meat forever. Getting people to not use LLMs? That's where most of us were up until very recently.

"Don't use LLMs" is just another variant of "don't use electricity".

Reframe the problem like that and then realize that no one's going to do it: global electricity use is constantly increasing. Fortunately, global renewable energy use is also growing incredibly rapidly.

Which problem seems more tractable? Because reality has already proven it: people will happily switch to clean electricity and keep using electricity. They won't voluntarily use less electricity unless they get some benefit from that - i.e. reduced expenditure, or just plain more stuff (i.e. my LED lights consume a fraction of the power of my previous halogens, but are brighter and I have more of them and also can change light color on a schedule).

Maybe because we didn’t make real progress in the existing pollution and have a greater chance stopping a new polluter.

How long are climate change and its reasons known?

In the end people vote climate change deniers because they don’t like the inconvenient truth

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